It’s weird to say this week looks… slow compared to the last one, when everyone in the industry seemed to have simultaneously decided they were putting on their own giant gala festivals. But that’s part of the weird and wonderful experiment in rewiring the way entertainment works while we’re all in quarantine: A couple weeks ago having multiple music festivals inside a video game wasn’t a thing anyone would consider normal, and now we have to figure out what to do when 400 different artists aren’t stomping around Minecraft at all times of the day. Luckily, there’s still an ocean of content to sail through, and we’ve got some time ahead of us, and someone will probably come up with something in the meantime. So hit the links below, and lets navigate our way to a measure of wonderfulness together.
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Monday, April 27
Mondays with Me: Read-along with Michelle Obama
Maybe this isn’t so much for you as it is any little kids you have tear-assing around the house as we head deep into month two of quarantine. But who cares? It’s Michelle Obama volunteering to help those young’uns practice their reading, and also giving you a little (but much needed) break. This happens every Monday on the PBSKids YouTube at 9am through May 11th. Treasure it —it’s not often a real First Lady is going to read to your rugrats, so take advantage while you can.
Never Have I Ever
Mindy Kaling’s follow-up to The Mindy Project and the under-seen and under-appreciated Late Night is a new romantic comedy for Netflix named after a classic teen game that very often led to awkward, endearing, cringy, and complicated truths being unearthed. The show absolutely lives up to that promise (and partially explains why it is kids keep playing this mortifying game), centering on a high school sophomore named Devi, still getting over the sudden death of her father, her own paralysis, and less-heavy-but-no-less-important dilemmas like “thick arm hair,” “Can I get Paxton the hot jock to like me,” and “am I doing kegels right.” Never Have I Ever doesn’t go for the big joke anywhere near as often as Kaling’s previous projects, but what it loses in comedic audacity, it makes up for with an abundance of heart.
Pac-Man Championship Edition 2
In 2020, video games are where music festivals happen. In 1981, video games were basically Pac-Man and that was about it. Well, Pac-Man’s come quite a long way. Maybe not “virtual concert,” long, but definitely “oh wow this is a rave now” long, as the “Championship Edition” series of Pac-Man games revived and revitalized Pac-Man for the 21st century by changing the gameplay up, adding some legitimately good EDM on the soundtrack, and turning the mazes into mind-melting kaleidoscopes of light and color. And now you can own and play Pac-Man: Championship Edition 2 for free on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. You have until May 10 to download the game, but once you do? Like T La Rock once said, it’s yours.
Avengers: Endgame Watch Party and Commentary with the Russo Bros.
The Community directors made a superhero movie last summer, and it turns out it was pretty good, and people liked watching it a lot. Well, since everyone’s inside all day all the time now, and they saw that someone made a viral video of a WWE crowd watching their movie about Hammer-Man, Shiny-Pants, and America’s Ass, they decided they’re going to get in on this big ol’ watch party thing with a running commentary track that starts on Instagram at 4pm, moves to Twitter at 5pm, and covers every minute of their three-hour-long epic conclusion to the Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster cinema for the time being.
Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal
The man responsible for some of the finest animation TV has ever seen (Samurai Jack, Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, Star Wars: Clone Wars) returned to Adult Swim in 2019 with a goddamn vengeance. Primal is a wordless five-part story about a man and his dog, wherein the man is a prehistoric survivor of a horrific dinosaur attack that wiped out his family in three bites, and the dog is a Tyrannosaur who also lost her family in a similar fashion. The two team up out of necessity, and become a makeshift family of their own… while fighting a river of giant snakes, mountain-dwelling giant spiders, literal bat-men, and potion-slurping super-apes. It’s probably the best action movie since Mad Max: Fury Road, and it’s now available both on Adult Swim and ad-free via Hulu (if you have Hulu w/ Live TV).
Nardwuar the Human Serviette
DID YOU KNOW: The single best celebrity interviewer of all time was once the frontman for a “goof-punk” band from Vancouver BC called The Evaporators? He used to bounce his weird ass up and down the Pacific Northwest wrecking venue after venue, and it was good. But Narduwar had not yet had his “becoming,” and only after unlocking his inner Barbara Walters did he ascend to pop-culture godhood. Millions have lost whole days to just clicking through his YouTube channel and marveling at his conversations with artists including Odd Future, Tommy Chong, Jay-Z, Joan Jett, and more—and that was before we were all on lockdown. Go on, fill your head with some of the best content the wonderful world of online can provide, doot doola doot doo.
Etta James, Live from San Francisco
When people start throwing around the phrase “greatest singer of all time,” it’s usually Aretha who gets anointed, and rightfully so—but some days it’s clear that Etta deserves the mantle. For example, I keep coming back to Live from San Francisco, taken from a small club show she performed in 1981 at the second, short-lived incarnation of the Boarding House. And I can’t believe I’m writing this, but her cover of “Take It to the Limit”—a song originally done by the godforsaken Eagles, for crying out loud—is nothing short of astonishing. NED LANNAMANN
Tuesday, April 28
Kung Fu Theater: Five Fingers of Death (with the Hollywood Theatre‘s Dan Halsted and the New Beverly Theater’s Quentin Tarantino)
Joni Mitchell once said “don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone,” and boy if that doesn’t apply to Dan Halsted’s monthly tribute to all things whoop-ass, Kung Fu Theater at the Hollywood. The man damn-near singlehandedly rescued the rarest, most important documents of martial arts history, and would screen them at his theater for no other reason than “they need to be seen with an audience.” Tonight is a good night to try replicating this vital PDX experience for the home: Click here to donate some funds to the Hollywood Theatre. Gather up some of your friends who share the affinity for flying frenzied fists of fury, and congregate on your chat app of choice (Zoom, Discord, Skype, etc). Cue up Five Fingers of Death on Amazon Prime, part of that platform’s remarkably large catalog of classic Kung Fu. And then, when your senses have been satisfactorily assaulted, click here for a post-film Q&A from the Pure Cinema Podcast, starring Dan Halsted and New Beverly Cinema owner (and part-time screenwriter/movie director) Quentin Tarantino, to hear about how they fell in love with the genre, and why they work so hard to keep it alive in their own way.
Live Wire! Radio House Party
The only way this could be even more perfect is if Kid ‘n’ Play were actually hosting Portland’s world-famous live ‘n’ local public radio variety show. That might still happen, who knows, but in the latest installment of this socially-distanced version of Live Wire, the tried and true (and charming-as-hell) team of Luke Burbank and Elena Passarello welcome special guests including author/blogger Samantha Irby as a guest judge on Live Wire Court, food journalist Francis Lam of The Splendid Table, teaching you how to take your grilled cheese to the next level, and Mandy Moore teaming up with Taylor Goldsmith to sing you a song from her latest LP, Silver Landings.
Honey Boy
Oh, how easily this could’ve gone sideways. There’s nothing more cringingly embarrassing than a privileged white artist depicting their tragic life on film, forcing their audience to wallow alongside them in their self-serving importance. But in Honey Boy—a mostly autobiographical depiction of Transformers star Shia LaBeouf’s scary upbringing as a child actor, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video—there’s so much more. In a dazzling, heartbreaking performance, LaBeouf portrays his real-life father, a recovering addict, Vietnam vet, and frustrated performer who’s in the witheringly humiliating position of being employed by his successful 12-year-old son, Otis (a fantastic Noah Jupe). Running parallel are harrowing scenes featuring an adult Otis (Lucas Hedges), who’s working out some well-earned and very deep shit in rehab while trying to stave off an emotional implosion. Dreamy imagery from director Alma Har’el and cinematographer Natasha Braier brilliantly captures this slow-motion train wreck of a tale that, weirdly enough, supplies a modicum of hope while depicting the toxicity that fathers inflict on their sons—and what results from the poison they inherit. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
Sex Education
This marvelous Netflix original elevates itself beyond teen raunch (although there’s plenty of that) to become a frank exploration of the dramas that ensue when adolescent hormones ricochet off each other. It’s smarter, funnier, and more emotionally engaging than you might be expecting, but it is sort of a fantasy, though, in keeping with creator Laurie Nunn’s influences, including lot of John Hughes touches (which are pretty alien to the show’s modern British setting). It also takes place on a gorgeous, hilly nook by a Welsh river that feels like something out of a fairy tale, or a Rick Steves travelogue, and the music of Ezra Furman (newly available in LP form) provides a lost-in-time sensation to the show, with ’50s and ’80s-echoing tunes serving as a kind of Greek Chorus. Sex Education makes so many bold choices that you’d think it’d slip up on at least a couple of them, but somehow it doesn’t only hang together, it becomes something greater than the sum of its unusual parts.The show might be set in a stylized world, but every smile and tear it provokes feels utterly authentic. NED LANNAMANN
Tom Misch
I love that every now and again the music world will present a laid-back champion fit to carry the mantle stylishly hoisted by yacht-rock heroes of yore like Michael McDonald or Al Jarreau. One such gangly weirdo who seemed to appear fully formed out of nowhere in the last five years is the UK’s Tom Misch, who began his career as a Dilla-acolyte, sharing beats on Soundcloud before teaching himself how to sing and becoming a young captain on the seas of smooth so notable that De La Soul saw fit to drop a guest spot on his debut album, Geography. Well, he’s back for 2020, teaming up with Yussuf Dayes for What Kinda Music and wouldn’t you know it? This shit slaps.
Wednesday, April 29
Telling Lies
In the early days of gaming there were a lot of attempts to emphasize the “video” part by trying to make movies playable. In the ’80s and ’90s, this meant janky exercises in laserdisc frustration (Dragon’s Lair), CD-ROM pixelation, and failed titillation (Night Trap). By 2020 they had figured out how to make movies actually playable (the Black Mirror movie Bandersnatch being a good example) and one of the best entries in this genre is Telling Lies, a game that creator Sam Barlow calls a “desktop thriller,” starring YOU as a former FBI agent who is going through two years of electronic surveillance on four suspects, (played by Logan Marshall-Green, Kerry Bishé, Alexandra Shipp, and Angela Sarafyan). Since the conversations are all one-sided, you have to piece together who is talking to who, and when, and then you have to figure out how much of what they’re saying is true, and solve the ever-expanding mystery sprawling out in front of you. The highly-engrossing game debuted on PC in August 2019, but only just yesterday became available on PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch for $19.99.
Halt and Catch Fire
As it turns out, Telling Lies isn’t the first bit of extraordinary entertainment focused on the advancement of video gaming that Kerry Bishé has been involved in. She was also one of the leads (although you wouldn’t know this was the case in season one) of Halt and Catch Fire, an AMC drama that found a second life on Netflix. It had a lot of things going against it in that first season: It was being sold as as Mad Men-esque drama about a brash anti-hero in the Don Draper mold, and that’s… kind of what it actually was at first, but with a much clunkier title, and a much less attractive milieu (the personal computing industry in the early ’80s vs. the advertising industry of the ’60s). But as the first season came to a close, its showrunners realized what the show needed to be was the story of two very complicated women fighting themselves and a closed-minded industry to reinvent basically everything they ever interacted with, and make it better for everyone. Halt began as a cynical look at damaged men laying waste to the ’80s, and ended as possibly the most human, empathetic, and rewarding drama that AMC has ever produced. It might sound hyperbolic, but the four seasons that make up Halt and Catch Fire? It’s a journey, and one absolutely worth taking.
Ozark
Another show that began life as sort of a pale (pale-er) imitation of a prestige AMC program? This current mainstay in the Netflix top-10. Yes, Ozark really isn’t much more than “The Arrested Development guy does Breaking Bad“—at first. But the show slowly becomes something more than an “unassuming family becomes cog in a crime empire” story. A huge part of its appeal is due to the “Arrested Development” guy; not his work in front of the camera, but behind it. Jason Bateman the director is so, so much more interesting than Jason Bateman the money-laundering anti-hero (Julia Garner and Laura Linney are the real stars of the show), and as Ozark starts lifting whole chunks from the backwoods-gangster epic Justified, Bateman begins applying a horror-film sheen to the proceedings that fits the show’s off-kilter strengths perfectly. It’s weird to say that the star of Teen Wolf Too is this good at working in John Carpenter’s wheelhouse, but these are strange times, indeed.
Dinosaur Jr. at Pickathon
And speaking of cool things happening in the woods, Pickathon’s “Concert a Day” series isn’t just trucking along fantastically, but it’s presenting an extra-special treat for today: Dinosaur Jr’s full set from the Mt. Hood stage in 2017. Pickathon themselves describe the sound they made back then as a “grungy, jangly, mesozoic wall of sound” that “went down in the annals of Pickathon history,” so if they’re offering you an opportunity to literally relive that day in history for free, why the hell would you pass that up?
Silent Reading Party
A lot of people are taking the opportunity to turn the online version of The Stranger‘s super-successful words ‘n’ vibes experience into a weekly online destination, a respite from (waves hands exasperatedly at basically everything) and an opportunity to simply… slow up, sit down, and just listen to live piano music while sinking into a good book. If you haven’t tried it out yet, tonight’s the night, and we’ll see you at 6pm. If you have tried it out before? Welcome back. It’s a damn nice oasis of low-key bliss, isn’t it?
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
If you’re looking for a book to read while you settle in for that reading party, why not try Rebecca Skloot’s award-winning detective story/science story/true-life-mystery The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (link goes to the Multnomah County library’s ebook). Skloot creates a fascinating narrative out of the story of the first ever cell line to survive indefinitely in culture, and deftly blends scientific history with the life of the Black woman who (unknowingly) provided the cells and her family’s (mis)treatment by the scientific community. From there, Skloot reaches out to address topics in the history of tissue research, medical ethics, and exploitation of research subjects—especially African Americans.
Thursday, April 30
Parks and Recreation Reunion Show
Rem through sitcom bliss, because tonight at 8:30pm on NBC, the gang at Pawnee is getting back together for a scripted special reunion show, starring Amy Poehler, Adam Scott, Aubrey Plaza, Rashida Jones, Nick Offerman, Retta, Aziz Ansari, Chris Pratt, and Rember a little bit ago, when we suggested one of the very best feel-good binges you could go on while sheltered-in-place was this show? Hope that binge was more like a lightspeed jauntob Lowe (as well as unnamed special guest stars… and Jerry, too, I guess, probably) in a story written by series co-creator Michael Schur about Leslie Knope trying to keep in touch with all her favorite people during this coronavirus crisis. Donations made during the show benefit Feeding America.
National Treasure
Is this completely ridiculous movie the platonic ideal of all things Cage? A Cage that is uncorked-yet-still-safe for the whole family? Before, if you wanted some measure of ripshit Nicolas to enjoy, you’d have to wade into deep (and deeply weird) waters, such as the kind found in Port of Call New Orleans or Vampire’s Kiss, and those are not titles you can just put on while your kids are in the room. Maybe you could get away with Peggy Sue Got Married, or Moonstruck, or Raising Arizona, but this Disney adventure—this goofy-as-hell, lighter-than-air riff on Dan Brown’s terrible Da Vinci Code that’s better in every way—finally hits Disney+ tonight, and it seems inevitable that this premiere guarantees new generations of Cage Ragers will extend his outsize legacy even further into the future. The children (and Cage) will save us all. Believe.
National Theatre Live’s Frankenstein
The latest title in National Theatre Live’s #NationalTheatreAtHome series is director Danny Boyle’s stage adaptation of the Mary Shelley classic, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. The trick of Boyle’s stage show is that both Cumberbatch and Miller could—and would—swap roles on any given night, in keeping with Boyle’s desire to tackle the story in a way that amplifies the idea that the doctor and the monster create each other in their own ways. Whatever version airs tonight on the National Theatre YouTube, the other version plays tomorrow. You’ll want to watch both, no matter what.
A Secret Love
You see the names Ryan Murphy and Jason Blum in the credit block of something, you’re probably in for something highly acidic at the very least. Seeing their names together on a project might seem like a guaranteed night of delicious nastiness. And yet, A Secret Love, produced by both men and directed by Chris Bolan, isn’t an experiment in sci-fi, horror, or alternate history, but a documentary focused on the true story of Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel, two women who met while playing baseball in the same all-women’s league that inspired A League of Their Own, fell in love, and created “seven decades worth of stories” together, in secret, before coming out to their friends and family in 2009. Someone once said there’s no crying in baseball, but tonight? That’s a damn lie.
Cunningham
Dancer, choreographer, and founder of a world renowned dance company, Merce Cunningham is considered profoundly influential, and not just in the world of modern dance. Through his collaborations, Cunningham left his mark on avant-garde art, across mediums. Born over 100 years ago in Centralia, WA, Cunningham spent spent seven decades in the world of dance, founding the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and this documentary tells the story of his remarkable life by juxtaposing archival footage, interviews, and footage—both old and new—of his dancing. SUZETTE SMITH
Aldous Harding
Aldous Harding’s voice is a weird world, some sideways place where everything is always melting and morphing. It’s a slippery and enchanting marvel that glances the hermetic realms of Scott Walker and Marianne Faithful and Anohni, but it remains its own odd thing. It is a prism refracting midnight vibes—childlike wonder and stricken desire, brand new glee and ancient menace. Harding funnels it into recognizable pop forms, but it is too much, and so it spills past the lip of the common to claim the space beyond what is known. To hear it is to believe in something you will never touch. CHRIS STAMM